Margin of Sanity Investing Podcast

Today i’m talking with Siem from The Dutch Investors about four companies you probably haven’t heard of. All four are quality names trading at various degrees of “fair value.” We explain our thesis to one another and I think both of us ended up with a slightly bigger watchlist at the end. Be sure to check out The Dutch Investors’ Substack here: Check their Podcast here: https://thedutchinvestors.buzzsprout.com/2424967/followAND check out their website here: https://www.thedutchinvestors.com/Enjoy! Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Angie Setzer joins the show today to talk about the economics of grain! Corn, soybeans, and wheat are everywhere, but most investors completely overlook this universe. We talk farmers, chemicals, fertilizers, Russia, Ukraine, Bio Diesel and much more. Enjoy!Subscribe to Angie’s sustack here: https://substack.com/@goddessofgrainAnd follow her on X/Twitter: https://x.com/GoddessofGrain?s=20Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out Unemployed Value Degen and AK's collaborative write up on Cogent here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179456384Unemployed Value Degen's Substack: https://substack.com/@unemployedvaluedegenAK's Substack: https://substack.com/@ashwinkrishDisclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out Siegfried's work by following @researchgrizzly on X- Twitter and check out the website here http://grizzlyreports.com/Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Copper and human beings have co-mingled for more than three millennia, and mankind’s need for a steady supply of copper has only ever increased. Over the last 300 years, thanks to accessibility of housing (pipes) and the invention of electricity (wires), human civilization has become entirely dependent on copper for some of its most basic functions. Whether you noticed or not, this sort of growth hasn’t slowed down. If you want to learn about copper in general (as well as copper mining), my deep dive on copper is still available to all readers. Its also available as a podcast.But I’m not going to re-explain all of that to you here. Today I want to talk about the double edged sword currently pushing copper prices above their historical highs, and why I don’t believe this will “correct” in the near future. You see, usually with any commodity, high prices are the solution to high prices. When prices rise too far, suddenly new projects look attractive to investors, and they get funded, built, and produced. This dynamic is as fundamental to a free-market economy as any other. In the long run, this may also be true with copper - though inflation itself tends to lift commodity prices over the long-term in a permanent way (somewhat offset by improved technology/recoveries). Electrification, re-shoring, re-industrialization of Europe/U.S, NATO defense spending, electric vehicles, and AI infrastructure development ALL demand copious amount of fresh copper. But we saw that coming right? Eh. Not really. Not only has the West seriously underinvested in new copper supply, but we’ve also created a permitting environment that puts about a 29-year wait time between discovery and first metal. You may say, “But what about existing mines? Won’t they just ramp production?” Sure, but there’s another problem. You see, when someone builds a copper mine, they usually mine the “best bits” (the high-grade ore) first. The idea is simple: Money now > Money later. Plus, investors and bankers want to get paid back quickly - thats why they call those high-grade areas the “pay-layers.” From the late 80’s to today we’ve seen the reserve grades for copper mines decline by nearly half. In Chile and Peru (the largest copper producers by far), this problem is very evident. Chilean copper mines have experienced these declining average ore grades for a decade - dropping from 0.90% in 2015 to 0.74% in 2023, and are now typically around 0.6% in mature mines. That means for every 1 tonne (2204 lbs) of ore mined, there is only 13 lbs of copper present in the ore. But naturally the actual amount of copper that is recoverable is even less. And since all mines go from high-grade → low grade over time, the increased demand for copper only accelerates the problem. As Chile and Peru struggle to keep the copper flowing, the new “rising star” in the copper production world is…not the best option…The Democratic Republic of the Congo has arisen as a new hot spot for copper (and cobalt) mining. This is all well and good, but would you invest your money in the Congo? From what we’ve seen so far, the answer is, “sure, if you’re Chinese.” China has poured resources into the Congo a while now, in order to secure both the copper and cobalt reserves held within the region. The Congo is not the answer. Besides being effectively a vassal state of China, it is also ripe with its own political instability. Both the political left and the right in America can find fantastic reasons not to rely on the Congo for the nations copper. From optics to national security to just overall common sense, we need a better solution. Besides, the Congo’s copper output has already ramped up. And yet copper prices are still pushing higher and higher.The rise of China is only part of the issue. With a rise in GDP comes a rise in the consumption of energy, consumer electronics, automotive sales, defense spending, and all sorts of other things that fundamentally rely on copper. Considering China’s population and it’s ubiquity in the production/consumption of electric vehicles…we likely have not seen the end in Chinese copper demand.And then there’s India. Much like my “coal bet” write up, where I stated the case for Indian demand of steel-making coal, recycling ain’t s**t when you’re rising out of poverty. Copper is very recyclable. Thats a good thing. But when you have no copper to recycle in the first place it doesn’t mean much. India is going to need electric grids, power plants, and basically everything else that a developed nation requires to function, and all of it will require copper. In the U.S we manage to recycle a lot of scrap copper every year. We can do this because we 1) already mined, processed, and used a heck of a lot of the red metal over the last 150 years, and 2) we have invested a lot of $$$ into the capacity to recycle that copper. The same is true for steel by the way. India doesn’t have much copper to recycle simply because they aren’t “done using” their existing wires

Check out AK’s Substack “Unfair Advantage” here: https://substack.com/@ashwinkrishDisclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

At first glance you may be surprised that i’ve chosen to write about these two companies together, considering the seemingly fundamental differences between them. That said, rather than break down each and every figure for a quarterly report (I prefer doing that bi-annually), I thought it might be more helpful to reflect on both businesses in light of their polar opposite market reactions post-earnings. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Siem, from The Dutch Investors, and he described his personal investment focus as: “Things that don’t change.” This statement perfectly echoes the very point of my first-ever write-up on Substack, “Thoughts on the Market,” amidst the tariff selloff. At that time, seemingly all conversation was around two subjects: How will AI change things? How will Trump/Tariffs change things? In that writeup, I listed a myriad of things I don’t know, as well as a few things I think I do know. I suggest you get a few eye rolls in preemptively as i’m about to quote myself:So I ask myself what do I know.I know America will likely need more cement and wallboard in the future and that Eagle Materials (a newer position of mine) can survive a pretty heavy downturn. I also know its price is cheaper than its been in quite a while. I also know it has cash to buy back shares at this cheaper price and will likely do so. So i’ve bought more of this position that I already owned. A company i’ve already decided I want to own for the long term at the price I paid for it or cheaper - and its definitely cheaper.I know people still want fast delivery, lots of choices, and cheap prices. I also know about 4 million businesses run on AWS and that Amazon earns high margins on that revenue. I know Amazon is 20% cheaper than it was a month ago.I know no rational person in America, Europe, or even China wants a global slowdown, trade war, or god-forbid a hot war.Apr 24, 2025This wasn’t foresight, it was just common sense. None of that has changed so far. Last quarter, Eagle posted slightly better than expected earnings and the stock rose, and Amazon’s AWS simply failed to surpass the growth rates of Azure and Google Cloud, and so the stock fell. This quarter - Q3 2025 - the opposite happened. As I write this, Amazon has just reported earnings last night, and the stock appears to be bound for a double digit day of green. Eagle has also experience double digit price moves since earnings - in the other direction.None of this really matters - and I guess thats my point. But there are a few things I want to touch on. Amazon’s Ads Business Lets forget AWS for a minute. Through decades of aggressive investment and capital allocation, Amazon has managed to build not just an e-commerce company, but a logistical powerhouse. It invested shareholder dollars in building out the necessary infrastructure to provide remarkable service to ~220 million people world-wide in the form of Amazon Prime. In doing so, Amazon’s competitive edge in e-commerce is unparalleled by any company that doesn’t have its own airplanes, trucks, vans, and warehouses. On top of this infrastructure is an online everything store with every product you could possibly imagine, all at the best price you’re going to get. “We know what Amazon is…jack-ass”Ok, fair enough. But one very interesting part of Amazon’s business - that has somehow been buried in the news of AI, Trump, and self-driving cars, is this mega-cap online retailer/computing powerhouse moving into the ads business. Can you imagine a better data-set for an advertiser than someones Amazon Prime history? Its one thing to know what someone is interested in (Meta) and its another to know what they’re interested in buying. That is a powerful distinction if you ask me. At some point i’ll write about how Amazon’s TAM is still gigantic in e-commerce, and how they’re not even profitable in many geographies…yet. But really I just want to mention the part of the Q3 release that grabbed my attention: Announced partnerships that allow advertisers to buy ad space on Netflix, Spotify, and SiriusXM Media through Amazon AdsI wonder why advertisers would want to run ads on Netflix and Spotify through Amazon…Could it be that Amazon runs the world largest online retailer? And that this means they know a LOT about consumer behavior? Or perhaps its that Amazon also knows what people listen to on Audible, or read on their Kindle, or watch on Prime Video. Or is it because Amazon happens to also be the place where people might buy your “thing” to begin with? Meaning an advertiser could learn that i’m interested in buying a grill, play me an AD on Spotify because I watched “Meat Eaters” on Netflix, and then show me an ad for THEIR grill on Amazon?! Would that not constitute a “game changing value proposition”?All I know is that the ads business is growing at +20% (in Q3 sales were $17.7B, +24% YoY) with what I can only imagine must be very high margins. The ads business seemed to come out of nowhere, but its s

Check Out Ozeco’s Substack: “Crack the Market”Read Ozeco’s “Electricity is the New Oil” write-up Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out the full write-up for free on the Margin of Sanity SubstackDisclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Do you remember 2021? I do - I remember it well. Stocks had rebounded big time, and those of us who were buying during the Covid sell-off were feeling pretty damn good. I was only 2 years into my investing journey then, and my chest was rather puffed. I felt confident. I had taken risks and they had paid off.But something else was going on too… Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

The story of the French financial catastrophe known as "The Mississippi Bubble." Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Disclaimer: Not investment advice. This publication is for education and entertainment only. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may own (or short) securities mentioned and may change positions at any time without notice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed adviser who knows your situation. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out the substack here: https://substack.com/@marginofsanity Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out the substack here: https://substack.com/@marginofsanity Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out the full write up here: https://substack.com/@marginofsanity Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Check out the Margin of Sanity Substack Here: https://substack.com/@marginofsanity Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

The full text write up is available for free on the Margin of Sanity substack. https://substack.com/@marginofsanityReally hope someone finds this as interesting as I do. Subscribing is free!Thanks for reading. This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Margin of Sanity at marginofsanity.substack.com/subscribe